Quality and Innovation

A socio-technical system is a collection of people, projects, processes and products that engage in an exchange relationship with one another:

• People translate, transform and communicate within the system, and between the system and its environment,
• Projects and Processes discover, interpret, constrain or transform aspects of the system (e.g. software, physical surroundings, laws, regulations, standards, QMS)
• Products result from projects and processes, and provide a snapshot of the state of understanding at a particular time (e.g. documents, artifacts, software, hardware, data)

Projects, processes and products are all technologies. When represented as a network, at least some of the nodes of a socio-technical system are people. Thus socio-technical systems can be contrasted with social networks, where all of the nodes are people, and other networks (e.g. PERT/CPM) where none of the nodes are people.

Socio-Technical System = People + Projects + Processes + Products

Our definition of the socio-technical system is supported by the one from computingcases.org, an educational project focusing on ethical issues in computing, which was sponsored by the National Science Foundation. This site notes that socio-technical systems consist of hardware, software, physical surroundings (e.g. buildings, office layouts, plant layouts), people, procedures, laws, regulations, data, and data structures. Quality Management Systems can also be considered potential components of a socio-technical system. The site also explains that “the ethical issues associated with [computing] are based in the particular combination of technology and social system. It is the technology, embedded in the social system that shapes the ethical issues.”

Research into socio-technical systems began in earnest when factory automation led to undesirable, and unpredicted results. For example, Trist & Bamford (1951) asked the question “why did increased automation in coal mining lead to decreased productivity?” Even though coal processing was going better, and the workers were being paid higher wages in response, absenteeism was up and morale was down. The company’s recent improvements in automation had shifted the organizational structure into a form that just wasn’t compatible with the culture – a problem that organizations today continue to face.

The philosophical perspective calls out the need to balance “efficiency and humanity” – a distinction that is strong enough to potentially shape a company’s values.

The concept of the socio-technical system was established to stress the reciprocal interrelationship between humans and machines and to foster the program of shaping both the technical and the social conditions of work, in such a way that efficiency and humanity would not contradict each other any longer… [to understand] the complexity of real situations rather than… analyzing separated aspects. So the idea of socio-technical systems was designed to cope with the theoretical and practical problems of working conditions in industry. Widening this idea, I suggest that we regard the socio-technical system as the theoretical construct for describing and explaining technology generally. (Ropohl, 1979)

Socio-technical systems can often be leveraged in a constructive way to simultaneously achieve technical excellence and quality of work life.

Trist, E.L. & Bamford, K.W. (1951). Social and psychological consequences of the Longwall method of coal-getting. Human Relations, 4, 3-28.